


Guys and Dolls

by ginger_mosaic



Series: Free to Be... [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Agender Castiel (Supernatural), Castiel in a Skirt, Charlie Bradbury Lives, Charlie Lives, Future Fic, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, Season/Series 12, heteronormativity is the worst, nonbinary Castiel, rated M for language only, toxic masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 17:57:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11446065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginger_mosaic/pseuds/ginger_mosaic
Summary: “I’m not a man, Dean.”---Charlie has taken Cas thrift shopping four times in the last two months, and each time he comes back with a new article of clothing more hideous than the last.This time, he returns with the ugliest skirt Dean has ever seen.





	Guys and Dolls

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying something different with this one... Let me know what you think?
> 
> Suuuuuuuuper warning for transphobia and homophobia. Dean doesn’t understand gender, and his opinions and internal monologue don’t necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of the author.
> 
> This takes place… at an unspecified point in the show’s timeline. Charlie lives because Charlie lives in all my fics (with notable exceptions) because fuck canon. Just put this somewhere in Season 12 or ~in the future~ after Season 12 or 13.
> 
> I don't have a beta reader, so lmk if I got anything wrong. Thank you.

It’s all Charlie’s fault. It started when she got Cas drunk enough at a Moondoor afterparty that he let her and some of the other players dress him up. He came out of the other room in this dumb _dress_ , and then he was apparently far gone enough that he didn’t mind if they took pictures.

Now Charlie has taken Cas thrift shopping four times in the last two months, and each time he comes back with a new article of clothing more hideous than the last. The first time it was the dark green velvet shirt, then the furry sweater made from God-knows-what, and then the tie-dye pants.

This time, he returns with the ugliest fucking skirt Dean has ever seen.

It’s like someone took a quilt and decided it would make a great skirt, but then they fucked it all up and had to patch it with random squares from the discount crate. There’s a square with pink flowers, another with child-like drawings of pine trees, another with a sky, and one with lifelike bee diagrams.

Fucking _bees_.

The skirt falls just past Cas’s knees, ending in some stupid lacy pattern that reminds Dean of doilies, and Dean hates it. He hates the whole thing, and he’s mad at Charlie for encouraging Cas to buy it.

Men don’t wear _skirts_.

“He’s an angel,” Sam tells him. “They technically don’t have a gender.”

And: “What about kilts?”

“That’s different,” Dean hisses at him. “Kilts are kilts. _That_ is a _skirt_.”

Sam just frowns at him dubiously. Dean shouldn’t have expected him to get it.

Cas wears it around the bunker like anyone else would wear sweatpants, so Dean doesn’t understand why he doesn’t just _wear sweatpants_.

“Come on, dude,” Dean complains when Cas curls up on the couch in the TV room with his legs crossed under the skirt.

Cas just shrugs. “It’s comfortable.”

“Well, it’s making _me_ _un_ comfortable.”

Cas glowers at him until he throws up his hands.

“Whatever.”

“At least it’s not a dead man’s robe,” Cas snipes.

“Shut up, that robe is comfy as fuck.”

“ _Exactly_ ,” Cas says.

Whatever.

 

* * *

 

Mary shows up at the bunker early in the morning a week after Cas got his skirt. He’s been wearing it every day, though thankfully he changes into pants whenever they go out into town. It’s apparently too much to hope for that Cas won’t wear it in front of company, because when he joins them for breakfast, there it is, swishing around his calves.

Mary blinks and smiles. “I like your skirt, Cas,” she says.

Cas beams at her. “Thank you.”

He goes to the coffee machine to pour himself a cup. The skirt flaps around his legs, but men’s hips don’t sway like women’s do, so it’s different somehow. Dean doesn’t understand why he can’t just wear pants.

When Cas sits down with them, Mary asks, “Where did you get it?”

“Charlie and I went to Hastings last week,” he says. “She says now that I’m human, I should have more variety in my wardrobe.”

Mary smiles brightly. “That sounds fun.”

Dean snorts. Yeah, _fun_. It sure is _fun_ that Cas is spending all their money on hideous clothes.

“Can I come next time?” Mary asks.

“Sure, you and Charlie can get him a cocktail dress next,” says Dean, “and take him out for a night on the town.”

Mary narrows her eyes at him, and Cas tilts his head to the side. Dean ignores them and shovels scrambled eggs onto his toast.

Mary tells them about her latest hunt—a revenge haunting—and Sam tells her about theirs—vamp nest—but whenever he prompts Cas to pitch in, Cas is preoccupied with his phone. He fiddles with it throughout breakfast, frowning.

Finally Dean can’t take it anymore. “Cas, put your phone away, man,” he snaps. “We’ve got company.”

“What are you doing anyway?” asks Sam.

Cas looks up, a frown still creasing his brow and making his nose scrunch up. “I don’t think I’d like a cocktail dress,” he says.

Dean snatches his phone from his hand. Cas has got a Google image search up of “cocktail dresses.” Somehow the search engine has come up only dresses with tight-fitting bodices and full skirts. Dean imagines Cas in one of the blue ones, one that would expose his collar bones and shoulders, and his gut twists. How fucking stupid.

“I don’t think I’d look good in those,” says Cas.

Dean scoffs and tosses the phone onto the table. So Cas thinks he looks _good_ in that skirt. It’s not just about comfort. For fuck’s sake.

 

* * *

 

“Men don’t wear skirts.”

“I’m not a man,” says Cas.

 

* * *

 

When Dean dumps out Cas’s duffle on the motel bed in search of the lore book Cas swore was in there, the skirt spills out onto the duvet. He stares at it. He’s alone. Sam and Cas are back at the morgue, examining the bodies (probably sniffing them, in Cas’s case, the freak). He could burn it. Cas would think they lost it on the road, under one of the beds maybe. Dean would never have to look at the damn thing again. It would solve all his problems.

His phone rings.

“Did you find it?” asks Sam.

“Yeah,” says Dean, pulling the book from the pile of clothes. He shoves the skirt into the duffle and covers it up with the rest of Cas’s things, just t-shirts and socks and boxer-briefs. Cas would be sad, he thinks. Sometimes he’s already sad enough after his Fall. “Be right there.”

 

* * *

 

“You can’t wear that in public,” Dean tells Cas later, when they’re all back at the motel and Cas has changed into the skirt while they wait for nightfall.

Cas frowns. “I won’t wear it to hunt. It would be impractical for physical activity.”

“Good. It stays in this room.”

“Why?”

Dean throws up his hands. “Because men don’t wear skirts, Cas!”

Cas deflates and just looks disappointed.

 

* * *

 

 

Dean comes back from a grocery run to find Mary, Cas, and Charlie in the library with piles of thrift store clothes.

If this continues, the cards in the envelope will read, “Dean, in the library, with a blowtorch.”

“Ooh, try this one next!” says Charlie, throwing some purple thing at Cas as he starts toward the stacks, which he’s apparently using as a changing room.

“What the hell is going on here?” Dean demands. Charlie bites her lip guiltily from the floor, and Mary raises her eyebrows from the table in the center of the library.

“We went shopping,” she says.

“Clearly,” he says, eyeing the pile of clothes on the table. Nothing looks offensive from here. “What’d you do, buy the entire store?”

“Just things for Cas,” she says. She’s still watching him. He bristles.

“You’re not forcing him into dresses again, are you?” he says to Charlie.

She huffs. “I didn’t—”

“Jesus, Charlie, it’s one thing to do it for Moondoor, but you can’t just force him to wear that crap all the time.”

Charlie scowls. “I’m _not_. He _asked_ about that dress.”

“He doesn’t fucking know any better!” Dean hisses. “You can’t play dress-up with him just because he’s newly human.”

“Dean,” says Cas, coming out from the stacks.

“You’re taking advantage of him just so you can play some sick game—”

“ _Dean_.”

“He’s not your fucking _doll_ —”

“Dean!” Suddenly Cas is right up in his face, his jaw clenched and his eyes a hard, icy blue. “We need to talk,” he grits out, his voice like stone grinding together. He grabs Dean’s arm with a grip as stony as his voice and yanks him out of the library and down the hall. They go into Dean’s room, and Cas slams the door shut behind them.

“Cas, what the fuck—”

“I know you have a very narrow view of masculinity,” says Cas, every word clipped and cold, “and what men should and shouldn’t do or feel or want, but I’m going to tell you this one more time: I am neither human nor a man.”

Dean scoffs and tears his arm out of Cas’s hand. “News flash, genius: You’re human now.”

“I wasn’t for millennia. Angels do not have the human concept of gender. Or sexuality, for that matter.”

“Well—”

“Stop projecting your insecurities onto me,” Cas snaps. “You keep trying to make me conform to your standard of human masculinity. I _will not_. If you have even an ounce of respect for me, stop it. I am not _your_ doll either.”

Dean hadn’t realized how close Cas had gotten into his personal space, looming over him and right up in his face again, until Cas is suddenly gone from it. He steps back and whirls around furiously, and Dean’s door slams again when Cas leaves.

What. The. Fuck.

He paces to the door and back across his room again. Did he just get sent to his room by a fucking skirt-wearing ex-Angel of the Lord? What the fuck. And he wasn’t—He wasn’t treating Cas like a _doll_. He wasn’t dressing him up all the fucking time. He just buys clothes at Walmart or, yeah, thrift stores, and leaves Cas to dress himself. He didn’t—He doesn’t fucking sit there and pick out Cas’s outfits for him. Jesus. What the fuck.

It’s totally different. He just gets Cas the same stuff he’s always gotten for himself and Sam. What, that’s not good enough now? Suddenly _Cas_ has some sort of _fashion sense_? The guy who wore a fucking tan trench coat for a decade. _That_ guy has a fashion sense. Yeah fucking right.

_At least I don’t look like a lumberjack._

Yeah fucking right.

What the hell was he taking about? Projecting? What kind of bull shit—

— _what men should and shouldn’t do or feel or want—_

Fuck that. Dean does what he wants. And he wants burgers and pie and classic cars and women, goddamnit.

Goddamnit. What the fuck.

What the fuck.

 

* * *

 

“I’m not a man, Dean,” Cas says.

 

* * *

 

 _What about, uh, Castiel? He seems helpful and… dreamy_.

It’s all Charlie’s fucking fault.

 

* * *

 

It’s movie night, and since they’re catching Mary up on all the movies she missed since 1983, they’re watching some drama from the ‘90s that Sam and Charlie insist is “super important” and based on a true story. Dean’s not into teen drama or whatever this is, but he got to pick the last movie ( _Aliens_ , and it was a hit with everyone, so it’s not like he has terrible taste in movies, thanks), and now he apparently doesn’t get a vote.

He hates the movie. He doesn’t care how important and groundbreaking it is. It sucks. He hates it. Charlie cries, Sam sniffles, and Mary keeps her hand over her mouth for the last fifteen minutes under Dean’s arm. Dean can’t look at Cas.

When the credits begin to roll, Sam and Charlie immediately launch into a tirade of praise and outrage. Dean stands up from the couch and gathers the popcorn bowls, leaving Sam to explain the court cases of the real-life story. He goes to the kitchen and washes the bowls and drinks a beer, and when he gets back to the TV room, Cas is the only one left. He’s still sitting on the couch, staring into his whiskey glass. Dean had gone through almost half the bottle by himself, and Cas was still nursing his first drink.

“They all go to bed?” Dean asks.

Cas looks up, and Dean looks away and starts to tidy up the extra pillows and blankets on the floor.

“Yes,” Cas says. He’s wearing the skirt. Cas _likes_ that skirt. He thinks it look good on him. After that party, he asked Charlie if he could try on that dress. Mary says he’s the one who wanders around the store, pulling things from the racks. Dean’s never taken him shopping before. He’s never let him choose.

“Hey,” Dean croaks. “I’m sorry.”

Cas shifts on the couch. “For what?” he asks after a while.

Dean swallows. “For… I shouldn’t’ve… You were right. About me. I was… projecting. Or whatever. Do what you want. You should… You should do what you want.” He clears his throat. “I won’t… Uh… Yeah. If it makes you happy, then it’s fine.”

Cas is quiet for a few moments. “Okay,” he says at last. “Thank you.”

Dean shakes his head and stares at the floor. He can’t look at Cas.

“Dean.” Cas shifts and stands up. His skirt brushes his knees. “What about what you want?”

Dean grips the blanket in his hands. “I don’t—”

“Dean.” He moves closer.

“I can’t—I shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay, Dean.”

“It’s not.” His voice cracks, and he buries his face in the blanket. What the fuck. What the fuck.

Cas’s hands rest on his shoulders, and Dean clutches the blanket closer as Cas slowly moves to put his arms around him. Dean shudders.

“Cas, I can’t—I c-can’t—”

“It’s okay. Take your time. I’ll wait for you.”

Dean sniffs. Cas’s hands are warm on his back. He watched those hands bury an angel blade into a werewolf. When they got back to the motel to clean up, Cas changed back into the skirt and smoothed it over his outstretched legs on the motel bed with those same hands.

“I like your skirt,” he says. It’s only half a lie.

Cas chuckles. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he whispers. It’s fucking ugly as shit, but Cas likes it. When he wears it, he stands up straighter. He always used to slouch.

“I thought you might.” He can hear Cas’s smirk. “I noticed you watching me a few times.”

Dean’s face heats, but he doesn’t move the blanket even though it's really hot now. “Don’t.”

“Sorry.”

Dean shakes his head again. “Sorry I was a jerk.”

Cas sighs. “It’s all right. That’s just your nature.”

Dean extracts a hand to punch him in the side. Cas chuckles again. Dean swears he feels Cas press his lips to the top of his head.

“Do you want to watch another movie, or go to bed?” asks Cas.

He should go to bed. He should.

They put in the first _X-Men_ movie, and Cas lets Dean lean on him. Under the blanket, Dean rubs the fabric of Cas’s stupid, ugly skirt between his fingers and lets himself think, at long last, _I want you_.


End file.
